by Anna Roberts
“I don’t care,” said Blue, wondering if he was going to force her to wander around a zoo, just because he could. She didn’t let herself think about wolves. Especially not black ones. “Let me stop. I’m hurting; my back is killing me.”
Why is it doing that?
“I don’t know. I’ve been sitting too long. Or the seat’s not adjusted right. There are a dozen things it could be.”
But you’re young, said Yael.
“And you’re old,” she said. “Even if you won’t tell me exactly how old, I know you’re a hundred times older than any human could ever dream of.”
He went quiet. She wondered if he’d fallen asleep; they did that, she’d looked it up. Maybe he was learning what it was to be so young that you needed to sleep just because the effort of growing was so exhausting.
“Why would you want this?” she said, the ache in her back a slow grinding pain now. “All these aches and pains, and living every day knowing that you’re going to die? You get seventy, eighty years and then what?”
Then what? There was a question she knew he wouldn’t answer. He’d jumped out of Charlie’s body when it died, but how did it work when he had a body he no longer had to share?
She concentrated on the pain, blurring her thoughts. It was harder for him to hear her if he was absorbed in some physical sensation.
It’s hard, he said, his voice coming after so long a pause that she jumped. Being what I am. You can’t understand how it feels, all those impossible appetites. Centuries of phantom hunger pains, itches you can never, ever scratch. Besides, I’m not doing anything that hasn’t been done before; didn’t your God do the same thing? Become human?
“He became human to experience suffering. As sacrifice,” she said. “Gloria said you just wanted to get drunk and eat cheeseburgers in a hot tub.”
Yael laughed. She hated that more than anything; it gave her a weird tickly sensation on the inside of her skull, making her think of queasy stories about people who had itched so much they’d scratched all the way into their brains.
Maybe I’m the second coming, he said. Of Elvis.
There was a note in his laugh that sounded just like Charlie. He collected voices, sometimes sounding like Gloria, sometimes like Charlie and sometimes like a man whose voice she could only guess at. His real voice, she suspected, was the fractured stream-of-consciousness that had first seeped into her dreams back at Gloria’s place, skipping like a stone from one association to the next.
Her belly felt heavy and swollen. Once again she focused her mind on the ache in her back and hips, the feeling drowning him out. Maybe that was why Gloria had taken her lovers two at a time; if she distracted Yael with the physical sensations that he coveted so much she could steal five minutes alone in her head.
Blue thought deliberately about coathangers, gin and Planned Parenthood. She waited for the inevitable counter threats, but none came. He was too absorbed by the ache in her bladder.
She slowed the car, needing the next exit. Maybe I’ll find some trucker to fuck me, she thought. Get a moment’s peace.
But then that led to other thoughts, things she didn’t dare dwell on because she knew Yael would use him to hurt her. Quickly she sank down in her seat, putting more pressure on her lower spine. The pain was sharp and nasty, but it got his attention.
What are you doing?
“I’m stopping. I need to pee. Eat. And I need gas.”
He went quiet again. She pulled in.
The rain had stopped and the sun shone through the gaps in the steel-gray clouds, sheening the wet parking lot with a watery gold. The wind whipped the tops of the scruffy palms and when she breathed in, tasting rain and traffic fumes, she wanted to cry and cry, tormented by a flash of what it felt like to have her own head to herself. Such a strange thing to have taken for granted, but she couldn’t afford to think about it right now. She couldn’t even afford to think about a dim and distant time when it might stop, because the prospect of quiet was so painful a desire that she understood more and more why Gloria had put that gun in her mouth.
She stretched her lower back, but the ache was worse somehow, a foretaste of more to come. She tried not to imagine what it would be like to be all stuck out in the front. Just the thought of it made her frantic, that it might ever come to that. It would have to end before then, or she wouldn’t be able to stand it. She was half crazy already.
Blue hurried across the parking lot to a donut shop. Her bladder throbbed with the need to pee and she made straight for the bathroom.
“Uh, customers only,” said a server, but Blue hurried on.
“I’m pregnant,” she said, over her shoulder, figuring that would give her a pass. It was the first time she’d said it out loud, and it left a strange, metallic taste in her mouth.
There were voices outside, mostly drowned out by the musak piping into the bathroom, a tinny instrumental cover of Up On The Roof. It was so bland she almost enjoyed it, a horrible white noise that tuned out the silence in her head, a silence she couldn’t listen to for even a second, for fear she’d lose her mind all over again when it stopped. The stall door was marble patterned in pink and gray and Blue tried to lose herself in the swirls, but then a stray thought needled her - the marble pattern was almost an unconvincing as the one on Gloria’s kitchen floor.
She saw the smear her foot had left in the blood once more. Heard that flying chip of skull bouncing off a cupboard.
The sickly pink door burned bright for a moment. She swallowed a couple of deep breaths and got up. The music whined on and she washed her hands with snotty looking dispenser soap and let the sound of the water fill her head. It was nice here, if you could just hold your thoughts in check. Everything was flat and plastic, safely dead of resonance. The restaurant tables were the same smooth, featureless yellow as cheese slices. The potted plants were so perfectly, joyously green that she suspected that they were also plastic. Behind the counter the donuts sat fat and colorful, slick with glazes and bright with sprinkles. That server - a harried looking girl of maybe twenty - gave her the stink-eye, forcing her to the counter to buy something.
Blue bought a pink donut and a Coke; lately just the smell of coffee had made her stomach turn, one of those strange pregnancy aversions that she should have been talking about with friends, comparing notes with Stacy. Yael had robbed her of that, too.
She ate mechanically, tasting sugar, trying to think of nothing. She’d thought that taking the pressure off her bladder would make the backache better, but if anything it seemed to be worse. It ground away like a period pain, forcing her not to think about it for fear she’d get her hopes up. Hope that nature wouldn’t be ordered to Yael’s purposes and would take care of this on its own.
What’s going on?
He stirred. Shit.
“How should I know?” she said, and sat there for a moment in stunned silence, afraid that she’d spoken out loud. If Miss Stink-Eye over there had heard anything she gave no indication: she just carried on washing the floor.
You do know, said Yael. What’s going on?
Something twisted deep between her hips. She cried out, partly in pain, partly in triumph; her body was taking out the trash and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Not even him.
The girl turned to look at her. “Are you okay?” she said, leaning on her mop handle, her eyes narrow and suspicious. One of those people who were always looking to make sure nobody ever took advantage.
“I’m fine,” said Blue. “Thank you.”
The girl frowned and looked down at the floor beneath Blue’s table. “Um, excuse me, but you’re not.”
Blue looked, assuming she had dropped something and made a mess. But then she saw it. It was like a rebel flag, a bright red trickle that had run down her leg and stained her sock scarlet. “Oh,” she said, and tried not to smile.
Make it stop. I’m warning you. Make it stop now.
“Did you say you were pregnant?”
Blue go
t up. She said something to the girl - yeah, but it’s okay, don’t worry - but she was just making noises because she had to. The pain came again - hard and crampy - and she barreled back into the bathroom, feeling something wet squish between her legs. Yael screamed, his voice filling her head so completely that it drowned out the voices, the musak, the sound of feet on the floor.
DON’T YOU DO THIS DON’T YOU DARE I’LL PUT YOU IN A FUCKING COMA MAKE YOU AN INCUBATOR, A FUCKING VESSEL...
She could feel his fear as though it was pumping back through the placenta into her veins. And the strangest thing was that she understood it in a way she had never grasped his feelings before, because they hadn’t been human enough for her to get. This was the most fundamental flesh and blood fear of all; he was afraid that he was going to die.
Her underpants were soaked with blood. She sat down heavily on the toilet, no longer caring if her ass touched the seat. The pain was like a giant corkscrew working between her hips, trying to twist them apart. She stuck out a hand to steady herself against the fake marble door, struggling to ignore the people on the other side. The girl was talking in her flat little gray voice - “She just jumped up and shut herself in here when I told her she was bleeding,” - and there was someone with her, another woman - “Honey, open the door. I’m an RN, I can help you.”
Once again Yael screamed in fear and frustration, and this time Blue screamed right along with him, unable to stand the way it burned inside her head. Oh God, he was making her suffer for this, even though it was beyond her control. It felt like the entire surface of her brain was on fire, never mind the sick, tearing sensations in her belly and back. Someone hammered on the door and she heard something hit the water, and the thought of what she might see in the toilet was enough to turn the world dark around the edges.
Lights out. Goodnight.
*
Gloria’s voice. Her young voice, not the crackly old lady voice that Blue knows. “Would you believe what I really wanted was the kids, the husband, the white picket fence?”
And once again the reply. No. Who would ever have believed such a thing from Gloria, of all people? She’s a witch, a werewolf, a spirit worker, a stone cold freak from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toenails.
Only now she’s standing in front of a mirror, dressed in bulging white lace, Yael’s laughter echoing in her head. Maury Blanchard wasn’t joking when he said she looked like Grace Kelly. Her blonde hair is piled and smooth on the back of her head, the fat knot sprinkled with rose buds. She thinks she sees the face of a real person looking back at her, someone of note, someone’s wife. Doff thy name, like it said in the play. Goodbye Gloria McCormick, hello Mrs. Maurice Blanchard.
And that just sets Yael off again. He’s giggling harder than a tipsy bridesmaid. You, respectable? Ordinary? That’s a laugh.
“I don’t see how,” she says. “When people have been comparing you to a skunkroach your whole life you have no idea what it means to blend into a crowd.”
She smoothes the dress down over her front and as she turns her head Blue sees an unfinished sharpness around the jaw that wasn’t obvious head-on. She’s grown out most of her adolescent gawk, but her neck still has the nervous, flower-stem delicacy of a child’s. She’s barely out of her teens, which means she’s done better than most McCormicks. Most of her cousins were knocked up long before their eighteenth birthdays, never mind their twenty-firsts.
Witches don’t blend into crowds, says Yael. That’s part of the reason they’re witches.
Right, she says. Because someone pointed a finger at the pissy, pipe-smoking old broad who looked at them cross-eyed while they were walking to church one day. Cue the ducking stool, the scold’s bridle and all the other happy apparatus of the witchfinder general.
That’s not for her. She’s had enough of being the odd woman out. She pictures bridge nights, sedate cocktails, snowless Florida Christmases with a big glazed ham armored with round slices of canned pineapple.
You won’t last five minutes, says Yael. You were never supposed to be like everyone else. You’re supposed to shine. Like the moon.
“Moon’s a reflector, dummy,” says Gloria, out loud. “It only shines because the sun does. It can’t shine on its own.”
Warren Yates told her that, and Yael jumps on the stray thought with his claws out and his teeth bared, snickering through them worse than an army of Donna Patinskys. Ah, Warren. What’s he up to these days? Anything to do with that bundle of joy in there?
“It’s not his,” she says. “So shut your foul mouth.”
Says you, little Miss More Pricks Than A Porcupine. Don’t I deserve some credit?
Gloria snorts. “For what? My less than immaculate conception?”
No. For keeping you in shape. The right shape. He’s marrying you because you’re knocked up, and I’m the only reason you can manage to stay knocked up. Like grandma said - there’s always a price in fairy tales - especially if you insist on playing the role of the princess. It’s so not your style.
“You gonna turn me into a pumpkin or something?” she says, once again smoothing down her dress.
He laughs.
You’re halfway there already. Everyone can see it, no matter how low you hold that bouquet. No, just the usual tariff. Your firstborn son should do nicely.
“Suits me,” says Gloria, who already has scorching indigestion and no intention of doing this ever again. This one’s a girl; she can feel it. Besides, she dangled a necklace over her belly a dozen times and it always spun clockwise. Then she said the paternoster backwards and mixed her spit with the feed of a broody hen; since then that hen has hatched nothing but girl chicks.
“Would you believe all I ever wanted was the house, the husband, the white picket fence?” Gloria says, once more, but her voice comes from a different point in time, a different place in her story – one that Blue’s already seen.
Gloria’s swallowing down absinthe and crème de menthe in Miami and the two men are laughing, because it’s funny, because she’s as far from June Cleaver as anyone can possibly imagine. Because she told Hornrims he could put it in her ass. Some hausfrau.
But somewhere in the tangle of thoughts and bodies Blue can hear her thoughts, thin and panicked. You gotta keep a man interested. A man without a body? Twice as much. Keep him in vicarious thrills. Keep him away from the kid.
*
“Oh God. That’s why she wouldn’t touch him.”
“She’s talking. What’s she saying?”
Blue tried to hang onto the picture, the boy howling in his crib and Gloria standing helpless at the door. It meant something, but it kept getting drowned out by that loud voice that went on and on, talking in the slow, staccato tone that people reserved for invalids and fools. “Is there someone we can call for you?”
Someone pulled her across the slippery floor and she moaned at the ache in her hips. Her underpants were off and she wanted to put them back on, but when she tried to sit up there was a hand on her shoulder.
“Shh, honey. Lie back. Everything’s going to be okay.” That was the one who had said she was an RN – a brassy redhead with very pink lips and a face that matched her voice, all soft and white like a featherbed. The girl was there too, barely managing to hide her resentment at Blue bleeding all over her nice clean floor.
God, the light was so bright. There was a big bloody handprint on the smarmy pink fake marble; hers, she guessed. Everything was well and truly fucked, unless something wonderful had happened. Unless she’d squeezed out Yael where he was hiding, holed up in the stolen body of her poor little unborn child. See how flesh feels when your lungs aren’t finished, asshole.
“You’re going to the hospital. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
No, not that. Not another hospital. Not another hole in the head. She tried to sit up once
more but her spine felt like rubber. There was a deep, wincing hurt in her belly, the kind of feeling that would usually have stirred Yael’s interest
, but he was quiet.
Silence.
“...honey, do you know how far along you are?”
“Shh,” said Blue. Are. Were. He was gone. He was gone.
She started to laugh and dared, for the first time since it had happened, to think about Gabe. Only now the pain of missing him was like a damburst – she’d been holding it back so long – and it turned her laugh into a wail.
“I know,” said the nurse. “I know it hurts, but this is important. Do you know how far along you are?”
“Sixteen weeks,” she said, quoting the last estimate. A week ago. Even though that couldn’t be right.
“Really? Judging by the size of you I’d say it was a lot more than that.”
Blue forgot how to breathe. And then she knew, on some horrible, inevitable that’s-so-Yael level, that this wasn’t over. He’d been a spirit for so long; of course he was impatient to be alive, even if it meant tearing through her and through a process that normally took nine months. She slowly raised her head from the floor.
There was a neat round hillock rising up from between her hip-bones.
“Did I lose it?” she said, like a prayer that the words might come true if uttered in front of a medical professional.
“I don’t think so, but it’s very important you get to the hospital.”
“No. No hospital.” Just let nature take its course, or let nature kick back against whatever unnatural thing Yael was trying to do in there. “I have to go. I have to leave.”
She tried to scramble up. Her foot slipped in blood, leaving a long streak across the floor. The girl clicked her tongue and Blue felt such a sudden rush of spite towards her that what happened next made an awful kind of sense.
The girl tried to speak, but she couldn’t. She grunted a couple of times and tugged at the RN’s sleeve, her eyes wide with panic. The nurse swatted her away but she pointed frantically to her lips, poking her fingers inside like she was trying to pry her tongue from the roof of her mouth.
“Do you mind? This is a medical emergency and you’re just being silly...”